This young soldier took turns at point with a good buddy of his, but the guys in his patrol liked him best because he was handy with the machine gun. They had been taking turns one day when his buddy was shot. It was a roll of the dice. If it had been him as pointman he would have been shot. The father spoke of how this buddy had died in his son’s arms shortly after being hit. His last words were, “Josh, I’ve been shot.” The father was reluctant to tell his wife about this incident. Mothers, you see, don’t mourn just for their own.

While nuclear utopians believe that if the U.S. reduces its nuclear arsenal other countries will follow suit, the reality is that not only have other states not done so, other nuclear powers have emerged, including India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

A grand total of two terrorists (Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi) with ties to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban—who have been American citizens—have been subject to military detention in the United States. Each challenged his military detention in Federal court prior to Congress passing Sections 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA of 2012.

This was not the first review of U.S. nuclear forces since the Cold War, as the review noted. As the panel urged in the report, this time, the government’s response needs to be “sustained and effective.”

But the inconvenient truth about all of this delicious D.C. drama is that swapping out one Pentagon pasha for another won’t fix President Obama’s floundering foreign and national security program. It’s not so much the people that are the drawback; it’s the policies. Simply said: We’ve been plowing into the plethora of international problems imprecisely.